Still In Winter Raining
by Matt LW
Summary: From the California gloaming to the Arizona sunrise... the rain follows him...


_Still in Winter Raining_

The lights flashed around him from thousands of small cars coasting by, their wheels rotating with amazing speed, sounding like a driving lunatic. And around him, in the small metal vehicle-millions of small raindrops fell, millions of tiny drops of liquid life, shimmering with fluid beauty fell onto the asphalt road where grime and dirt mixed with them to form a brown liquid. Outside the car, it was cold, forty degrees Fahrenheit. The sky was a black star, and gray clouds blanketed the horizon in a sheet of melancholy wash. The chilling air outside the car, along with the cold falling water and the wind caused a small layer of frost to build up on the chrome bumper of the car, forming intricate frost patterns of spider webs and crop circles over the freezing metal. However, inside the car it was a warm, a warm of crackling fire and embers from a Christmas flame simmering in a red brick fireplace. He leaned in his sheepskin brown jacket, which was two sizes too large on him. His head lay on the rubber armrest inside the car, on the left side of him metal poles in the dark wetness, and cars flashed by, their lights leaving firefly tails of crimson and golden brilliance. On his right was his brother, sitting still and looking ahead at the leather seat in front of him. And the wistful sound of a song was ringing in his ears. A song of a woman screaming a woeful cry, which danced up to high shrieks, to graceful lows, and the voice carrying throughout the tiny car with a sad scream. There was a very horrible eeriness to the song, no guitar, no accompaniment whatsoever. And the melancholy voice rung loud, a bell in a high tower over a Dutch countryside. Through the leather seats and bouncing off the glass windows, it rang, the eerie horrible song into his ears, and he did not like it. He was going to a new place, he was moving into Arizona. His old school and friends were left behind, and he would never see them again. He died, and was taking on a new life in the desert, where dust whistled through old man-silhouette cacti leaves, and lightning burned the black blanket of the night into a white and red and black massacre, and peaceful blackness over brown homes in the warm December night covered the land. There were boxes of cardboard piled up in the back of the mini-van, and they were tied down with twine. What few memories of the old California life were left behind, they were left behind with his old house and friends, his old life was there too, an unseen ghost which whispered in the minds of comrades which he would soon forget. His head leaned over on a frail neck, his world of thoughts sunk into a dark quicksand of sleep, and the horrible music with the eerie cry eventually was left behind in the conscious world.

He woke up to his father's voice. Sleepy eyes drifted up to the window like a rising helium balloon. There were no more tails of red or white coasting by with a protected silence. His head felt still, too still. It should be moving or rushing around. He realized this was because the car had completely halted. Around him were some trees, whistling and bowing to the ground in the wind and rain, and buildings with water dripping off their roofs with cold tears of concrete cool emotion. Sleepily, he remembered vaguely as he opened the door, and coldness rushed over his body, made the pants on his legs itch his calves, and the air sting his cheek with bees of the atmosphere. And he waited in the warm lobby, feeling uncomfortable in the strange room which he had never seen before. Eventually, he walked, following his mother and father and brother to a hallway carpeted in a velvet red river of fluff. His feet shuffled over the thick material, and before he knew it he was under sheets in a hotel bed, a silence rippling through his head; and static electrical crackling in his brain, the tiny cells of his mind arguing and thinking. His eyes opened, and the crackling continued in the silence which flowed through the room in a stream of quiet tranquil life and death. The complex patterns of stucco on the ceiling seemed to dance a silent jig before his pupils. Then, slowly his eyes closed by themselves, as if they knew it was time to be retired. And once again, he slept.

And he dreamed a strange memory, a dream where he was in his old life, in the life before the one he was going to. It wasn't much, he was only at his old school, talking with his friends at the table which they sat at every day at lunch, and his eighth grade teachers and all. There was his house too, the old house which he had became a friend with, he knew every crack and every secret crevice, and his bed and he could imagine his dad typing in the office. The sidewalks outside, many a time he had walked down them with a friend, talking happily and carelessly, blissfully. They were at the blue table, all of them. Laughing, he didn't remember what. They were laughing and smiling with all their hearts, and the warm food in his hands made him satisfied. In the hall he was walking down the gray concrete, opening his steel locker, thinking the thoughts a happy fourteen year old boy should think, and the sun shone a gentle waterfall of yellow brilliance, the sky was dark blue and fresh. A current of many different students coursed around him, some friends, some enemies, some alien. It was about five o' clock in the afternoon, and he was still at school. Waiting in the after rain for his mother to drive down and pick him up, he conversed with close friends in a small group, sitting on a gigantic stretch of asphalt. Next, he was at the beach, floating on cold salt bay waves, angels of water which lifted him, then let him gently slide downward. His body chilled, yet he grinned a salty grin of the seas and the ocean to his brother beside him, clutching a foam board.

In the morning the bed was gently moving up and down, still moving, and a light flickered on. The warm covers beneath him, and on top of him were comforting. He was awake. His brother was bouncing up on the bed, causing it to rock up and down. He yawned like a cat, and he put headphones on his ears. The boy stretched, slowly got out of bed, and shuffled over to the sink. He brushed his teeth, and the electric vibration woke him up. The boy's eyes opened wide in sleepiness, the air stung them as well. Then, he consumed a brisk breakfast of toast and orange juice, and an egg, and walked into the cold morning rain of the winter, and into the car again. The morning sun was only a dim light bulb, not a halogen light but a dim fluorescent light seeping through the winter gray clouds. He opened the side door of the car, and hopped into the seat. The engine sprung to life, it twirled excitedly and revved, sending steam out the back of the exhaust stained pipes over the puddles of muddy water on the ground, where circles of tears rippled from a falling raindrop. Then, his head dropped down into his arms, into the itchy yet soft skin of the sheepskin jacket. He did not sleep, his thoughts drifted the old times, the life of the past. And many hours passed, thousands of cars coasted across the silent road on his left. The rain stopped, and white light shone through the clouds. There were miles unseen of dirt and rock around the road, and the road itself vanished into a sharp needle of gray distant life and hope on the line of the dull horizon. Then, five hours later, the car halted. Lightning began to ripple though the clouds, branches of light and heat and power of the mysterious sky. A thunderous roar of supersonic shock wave boomed over the desolate land, and the boy got out of the car. He looked at the house before him, which had been purchased beforehand. He looked at the furniture in the back of the car, packed into brown boxes, and he stared out far, and saw a school, a school which he would attend this fall. There would be different teachers, different friends, different weather, different life.

There was a large red sign, with the word "SOLD" in bold capital letters, a red sentinel claiming the loam beneath its wooden foot, and the small pink-brown stucco-covered house behind it. And the boy and his brother and father and mother hefted boxes from the trunk of the car to the house, and set the boxes onto a tile landing inside the empty dark house. The boy walked into the house, fresh and strange and new. An eerie silence, which made the boy nervous-washed over the house in a lake of dulled sound, and his steps in the hall echoed their gunshot call, the echoes floated down and around the hollow house, which was an unfamiliar shell around the boy. And he slept that day, in the house, on a mattress which had been thrown out onto the floor like a dead animal laying in the grass.

The morning afterward he pinched the lever which unlocked the window, and pulled it open with a lion's roar. A cold icy specter drifted in, and he shivered and looked out the window, lightning streaked across the sky, its white branches of an unseen tree of energy and strength burned the morn sky, leaving red blood on the dark gray horizon. He pushed the screen out of the window, he didn't know for what strange urge he did this, but he listened as it hopped down the side of the stucco, chipping a few pieces off, and clattered on the dust twenty feet below. His hand coasted out the window, and it waited. His palm was warm, and the air above it was warm as well. And…a drop of water fell, from the sky. Then, another touched his index finger. Drops began to tap the land with delicate liquid hands and inquisitive fingers, probing every spot of dry dust and rocky soil, of the Arizona desolate land and the houses. Soon, rain was pouring from the heavens, from the gray-white coldness above to the brown coldness and dust below. Lightning and thunder rippled across the Earth, and the boy got out of bed. He walked down the stairs- he stood at the front door. And his hands unlocked the brass box, and the door swung open. He lived.


End file.
